Portal and open data guides
How to find the property data hiding in a Rightmove or Zoopla listing
A portal listing is designed to be skimmed. Read it as a document instead and it gives up a surprising amount: when it was listed, what it has been priced at before, how the floor area was derived, and which certificate the agent used.
What is on the page if you look
- Price history and listing age. Both portals surface added and reduced dates in some form. A property listed six months ago and reduced twice is telling you something the description will not. See asking price drop history.
- The floor plan. Read the disclaimer, the room dimensions and whether the stated total matches the sum of the rooms.
- The EPC. Listings usually link or embed the certificate graph. Note the date, then go to the register to read the full certificate rather than the graph.
- Material information fields. Tenure, council tax band, service charge, ground rent, lease length, parking and accessibility are increasingly published in structured fields following National Trading Standards material information guidance.
- The photographs. Window type, boiler flue, roof covering, damp staining, wall construction and extension joins are all visible if you zoom in.
- The description's hedges. "Scope to extend, subject to consents", "believed to be", "approximately" and "no history of flooding in the current ownership" are each doing specific work.
What the portal will never show you
Portals show the seller's side. The independent record sits elsewhere, and it is free:
| Question | Official answer |
|---|---|
| What did it last sell for? | HM Land Registry Price Paid data |
| What is the real floor area? | EPC register total floor area |
| Has it been extended lawfully? | Local planning authority register |
| Is it in a flood zone? | Environment Agency and planning.data.gov.uk |
| Is it listed or in a conservation area? | planning.data.gov.uk and Historic England |
| What is recorded crime like? | Police.uk street-level data |
Start with a postcode
Our free postcode lookup pulls EPC bands, flood exposure, registered sold prices and recorded crime for any UK postcode in one place, with no account needed.
A practical browsing workflow
- Shortlist on the portal as normal.
- For each shortlisted property, run the postcode through a lookup to see the area's EPC profile, sold prices and flood picture.
- Read the EPC on the register and calculate £/sq ft against comparable registered sales.
- Search the council planning register for the address before you book a viewing, not after.
- Take the unanswered questions to the viewing rather than to the offer.
The full method, including how to grade what you find, is in cross-checking UK property listings against public records.
A note on scraping and terms of use
Rightmove and Zoopla both restrict automated access in their terms of use, and their listing content is their and their members' copyright. Reading a listing you were shown, and looking the property up in public registers, is ordinary buyer diligence. Bulk-harvesting portal data is a different thing with different legal exposure — if you are building a tool, work from the official open data sources instead. See free UK property open data APIs.
Frequently asked questions
- Can I see how long a property has been on the market?
- Usually yes — both portals expose an added or reduced date, and the price history section shows previous listings for the same address.
- Does a relisted property mean something went wrong?
- Not necessarily. Sales fall through for chain reasons all the time. It is a question for the agent, not a conclusion.
Sources
Check a property before you offer
Run any UK postcode through our free lookup for EPC bands, flood exposure, registered sold prices and recorded crime. Got a specific listing? Paste the Rightmove link for the full six-section FirstBid report.
Related guides
How to find historical asking price drops on a portal listing
Where price reductions and listing age show up on Rightmove and Zoopla, how to cross-check them against registered sold prices, and what they mean for your offer.
How to evaluate any UK address for free using open data APIs
The official UK open data APIs that let you check EPC, sold prices, planning designations, flood risk and crime for any address — with endpoints and licensing notes.
The complete guide to cross-checking a UK property listing against public records
A step-by-step method for testing every claim in a Rightmove or Zoopla listing against EPC, planning, flood and Land Registry records before you make an offer.